Demand action on pensions - The looming crisis we all ignore

TRYING to instigate a discussion that might acknowledge our looming pensions’ crisis brings to mind those myriad sandwich-board men who warned us all with unshakeable certainty that “The End Is Nigh” — we all know he will be right eventually but we’re not that bothered about the grim prospect to do anything about it just yet. Make us good Lord, but not just yet.

Yesterday’s news that Waterford Crystal workers have, six years after they lost their jobs, received an offer of a modest pension settlement from Governmnet is a reminder, though people of a certain age do not need to be reminded of what lies ahead, of how very fraught the whole area is and how vulnerable private sector workers are on this socially divisive issue.

A modest pension funded over a lifetime of work by an individual and their employer that leads, or at least should lead, to a dignified old age is one of the buttresses of the social contract that has helped sustain European democracy for decades. However, that particular lifeboat was holed below the waterline by the wretched banks and their recklessness almost a decade ago. As hundreds of thousands of people have discovered the banks expect that all borrowings be repaid in full — and with interest — but that any funds entrusted to them to build a pension fund can be lost to the four winds without any consequences. It is as if pension investments were regarded as a each-way bet on the flapper at Tramore races rather than an individual’s provision for old age. That this issue is, for the moment at least, irelevant to public sector workers or pensioners shows how divided this society is and how deeply inequitable our current system is.